Government as G-d is Obama's theme

'Great big' mistake is confusing a 'great' nation with 'big' gov't

By JOHN PODHORETZ

President Obama spent 40 minutes yesterday treating the ambitious, far-reaching but completely unofficial long-term budget plan of an unknown Republican congressman as though it were the platform of his 2012 GOP rival for the presidency.

Maybe Rep. Paul Ryan's proposal to eliminate US government debt in 10 years will be the centerpiece of the Republican campaign next year. Probably not, though. Yet the president clearly hopes it will, and he seized on it to draw a bright-line distinction between him and the Republican Party.

The pitch is pretty simple: He's nice; they're mean.

Addressing the nation's long-term debt was the nominal purpose of the speech. But in fact it was about painting the GOP as the party that hates autistic kids and the elderly.

The Ryan plan, he said, will throw autistic children into the street, make it impossible for old people to go into nursing homes and cause potholes to go unfilled. "This is not the America I know," Obama said.

The president is suggesting that he intends to frame his re-election bid as a battle between the kind and the cruel.

But in setting it up as a fight of this sort, he is also signaling he is going to run with a message about the United States that is profoundly radical: What makes America great, Obama explicitly said, is the size of its government.

The great threat of the Ryan plan, he says, is that it will reduce the size of government's "commitments" -- i.e., the way it redistributes money by giving it to those it deems deserving and in need. And, by reducing it, the Ryan plan will bring American greatness to an end.

"We are a better country because of these commitments," he said. "I'll go further: We would not be a great country without those commitments."

This idea -- that America's greatness is to be found in the ever-expanding size of its social safety net -- may be the most radical thing Obama (or any president) has ever said.

It was once commonly understood that America's greatness comes from its unique and unprecedented political system -- a system of limited government that preserves individual liberties through a system of checks and balances against centralized power.

That system permitted the greatest and most enduring flowering of human ingenuity and personal accomplishment the world has ever known -- and because of its nobility, compelled the elimination of its own built-in injustices, like slavery.

Now here we are, in 2011, and our president is arguing that some programs created in the 1930s and 1960s -- 150 years after Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, and 70 years after Lincoln -- are what define America as a great nation.

Lately, Obama watchers of both left and right have been trying to make sense of him and what he believes. I think yesterday he showed us the very core of his conviction -- that America is to be morally judged solely on the basis of the services its government delivers.

In choosing to stand his ground and fight on these terms, he is ensuring that the 2012 election will provide profound clarity about the nation's direction in the decades to come.